This Free Android App Blocks Unnecessary Notifications and Lets Important Ones Through.
We all know how annoying unwanted notifications can be, especially when you’re trying to concentrate. But completely disabling notifications for an app can potentially mean missing important messages. That’s where the free Android app DoNotNotify comes in handy—it lets you set up custom notification filters.
Perhaps you’re in a group chat that’s mostly useful, but there’s one person who talks way too much. With this app, you can filter out that person, meaning you’ll only receive notifications when someone else sends a message. You can also use this to filter out news alerts about specific topics or public figures you’d prefer not to see pop-ups about. You get the idea.
The app itself is deceptively simple. Launch it, and you’ll need to grant it permission to access your notifications. After that, it will begin collecting your notification log. You can tap on any of these notifications to configure a rule.
The first thing you need to decide is whether you want to create a blacklist or a whitelist. You can add filters to the notification title (the bolded portion at the top of the notification) or the body (the summary below the title).
The whitelist feature is great when you only want to receive specific notifications from your apps. For example, your banking app might send you notifications about your credit score, which you want to see, but also promotions for other services you don’t. You can whitelist the words “credit score.” The same applies to news apps—perhaps you only want to see headlines from a certain app when the headline mentions a certain country or public figure.
Blacklists, on the other hand, allow you to do the exact opposite. The example with group messages I gave earlier is a case in point. You can also use blacklists to prevent news app notifications about certain public figures or topics.
It’s worth noting that the app requires access to your notifications to filter them, meaning it could potentially collect a lot of information about you—a concern raised on Hacker News . On the other hand, the app’s privacy policy is quite robust: it states that it doesn’t collect any information and doesn’t collaborate with third parties.
I don’t think this app is for everyone—it’s for obsessive users. But if that’s you, and you’re often annoyed by notifications, you should give it a try.